What makes pangolins more dangerous than pigs or ducks which have been a similar source of human diseases? Because I can't tell if pangolins are a greater threat or if they are just an easy target because the practice of eating them is not as widespread as eating other common disease carriers.

> What makes pangolins more dangerous than pigs or ducks which have been a similar source of human diseases?

It's less the species than the wet markets.

Putting lots of species in close proximity, particularly ones that don't naturally co-exist, facilitates host jumping. Its only comparison is with medieval European cities, where people, sewage and livestock had constant and close proximity to one another.

Which is what I expected. There is truth to diseases like this coming from dangerous food practices, but that often gets coated in a layer of ethnocentrism that pins it on a specific animal or the need to hunt wildlife instead of relying on a factory farming infrastructure (which is also increasing the potential for global pandemic by overusing antibiotics).

Bats can nest in many places where animals and livestock are kept. See MERS and its relation to bats and camels.

> Putting lots of species in close proximity

Live ones at that.

"Close proximity" does it a disservice when there are cages of animals stacked on top of one another such that the animals in the bottom cages may be covered in the feces of those above them.

Black market vs regulated market. Pangolins being endangered and protected mean they are only sold illegally. People selling animals illegally aren't getting health inspections. Of course regulations for legal animals probably need to be improved

Well, for starters you're reducing the number of attack vectors.

If the only animals we can eat are a small number of species from regulated farms, any crossover/issue is contained and traceable to those species and farms.

If you allow (including as a purchaser you create demand for it), in open market a wider range of species from a wider range of sources, you open up the number of attack vectors increasing risks to everybody on the planet.

Domesticated animals have well known diseases and at least you know where they came from. Wild animals are a complete unknown when they hit the market.

中国人不需要吃这样的动物。我们一起会改变中国。

"Chinese people don't need to eat these kinds of animals. Together we can change China"

* Still learning Mandarin.

that's correct

TCM in general is becoming harmful while the good it does isn’t clear at all, these renegade cures that involve wild endangered species even more so.

The CCP has already done so.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildli...

why stop at "wild" animals? might as well go whole hog (pun intended) and go plant based to the extent possible.

I really hope that is the future. Plant based meat or just proper free range farms and hunting I guess. Industrial meat production is too cruel and just another pandemic waiting to happen.

100% agreed here, I am very hopeful that lab-grown meat will become the norm (when it gets affordable), and that as older generations die off and more environmentally and health conscious younger people make decisions, the average consumer eats little to no animal products. Lab grown meat will absolutely be a huge help to this transition.

We simply do not have a choice - we're either going to have massive climate change and mass displacement, animal-borne viruses wiping out chunks of the population, fishless oceans by 2050, etc. We can't feed the population with animals anymore.

I wonder why I don't hear this argument more from vegans. Eating animals spreads disease. Chronic wasting disease, avian flu, SARS, Influenza, mad cow, probably even the common cold.

Vegans do make that argument sometimes, and it's often countered by the fact that other diseases and bacteria can spread on veggies, like salmonella and E. Coli on lettuce. And proper handling and cooking will kill viruses/bacteria, so it theoretically shouldn't be a real problem...

Note that I'm not arguing one way or the other, that's just how I've seen it play out a few times.

I don't have a horse in this race either, but bacterial diseases are far more manageable than viral diseases from a public health perspective. The fact that you can get the former doesn't balance the latter, if pandemic risk is a policy consideration you want to have.

Except for the part where bacteria can evolve permanent resistances to antibacterial agents, and survive for weeks or months on surfaces, while viruses have a limited ability to adapt to antivirals and have a short and finite span of viability in the wild.

Antibiotic resistance has an energetic cost and generally gets selected against in the absence of agents. Bacteria are also much easier (and cheaper) to test for. Even if there was a hyperbug, you can afford to check everyone inside a half mile of the infected for relatively low cost.

They won’t be if we keep pumping antibiotics into our food supply in the meantime

I know more people who've had hospitalisation levels of illness from lettuce than meat, raw or otherwise. My wife was recently made very ill from some salad leaves.

The vast majority of all food poisoning comes from greens. Not meat.

Plenty of folks die from Salmonella and E. Coli outbreaks

Sorry, but this is absolutely absurd to claim. Are you actually suggesting that keeping animals in cramped, filthy conditions, surrounded by dead baby animals covered in feces (ex. pigs in farrowing crates), is less likely to facilitate disease growth than growing romaine lettuce?

Edit: I re-read your comment and saw you were referring to food POISONING - but I'll still maintain my point here. Fact of the matter is, food poisoning is not contagious and is fairly rare, and there are machines in place for product recalls, etc. What we have at the moment is a global pandemic started by the close quarters of animals. Which one would you rather deal with?

And the reason it's more common to get salmonella or e-coli from plants is because they are eaten raw (lettuce or broccoli or carrots, etc); this doesn't mean meat isn't contaminated with it. It just gets "cooked off" because you heat meat (or pasteurize dairy).

> Sorry, but this is absolutely absurd to claim

Why is it absurd?

> is less likely to facilitate disease growth than growing romaine lettuce?

As I clearly stated I was discussing, as with the parent comment, the community of diseases that infect consumers is massively more prevalent in eating salads than meat. That's not an opinion.

You clearly want to have a different discussion

Aren't those cases often due to washing greens with water contaminated by livestock waste?

No.

While not definitive, it does appear there could be a connection. Certainly enough of a possibility for the industry to change some of their operational practices. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2018/08/cattle-feedlot-could-...

A very good point!

You will. Vegans do bring this up now, but they're outshouted by people talking about the more important problem at the moment - stopping the current pandemic.

I'd argue it's just as important right now to take the coronavirus as a massive warning and stop doing what we are currently doing. It's only a matter of time before this happens again - Bill Gates predicted this would happen back in 2015 in a Ted talk.

> Bill Gates predicted

Man predicts spread of virus in animal species. What vision.

Your phrasing suggests that it's very obvious, yet you are blaming salads as the real public crisis in an earlier comment. Fact is, breeding animals and raising them for food is going to keep resulting in pandemics. Like the one that we are currently going through.

Don't raise livestock or breed/catch wild animals, and the contact between humans and animals drastically lowers. Then pandemics don't happen. If that market in Wuhan didn't exist, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

Great. Comment stalking. That's the sign of a well balanced mind. Certainly not the behaviour of a detached zealot obsessed with shoehorning their personal dietary preferences into every conversation.

> Your phrasing suggests that it's very obvious, yet you are blaming salads as the real public crisis in an earlier comment.

You are clearly in such haste to find fault that you don't actually read the things you are arguing with. You jumped in on a discussion, made yourself look like a loony deranged type and here you are doing it again in a non sequitur fashion

Take your daddy issue driven zealotry elsewhere and stop harassing people

Alright, I'll stop eating bats and pangolins. Done.

They do but it's a mostly hopeless cause. If lab grown meat ends up being viable on an industrial scale at a competitive cost, our consumption of animals will likely be something that can be openly discussed without being instantly pushed aside.

I've argued this on HN plenty of times and I get drowned out by people telling me that they like bacon too much and that "well e-coli can spread on lettuce too so we might as well keep breeding hundreds of billions of animals per year and keeping them in filthy conditions in close proximity."

For a very scientific community, you absolutely hit a brick wall as soon as you tell a typically unhealthy group of people that eating meat is a massive public health hazard.

I'm sorry to put it so crudely, but this is a legitimate difference between the first and third world. And, clearly, it has consequences for the rest of the world. I don't understand why this is so controversial - we send aid to countries comperable in size to regions of impoverished mainland China. Only about half of China has modernized in the last ≈50 years and it's infuriating that bringing this up is suddenly socially unacceptable. These are facts which underpin life and death decisions for millions of people - we cannot sweep them under a rug because they happen to be localized.

Because you want people to actually do it

>People of China, please step up and protest the government

ha.

I don't think you quite understand how China works.

The 2009 swine flu epidemic originated in the states. Are you asking to shut down pig farms in the US as well?

> The 2009 swine flu epidemic originated in the states

As another comment [1] mentioned, the 2009 swine flu originated in Mexico [2].

The 1918 Spanish flu, on the other hand, originated in Kansas [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22694893

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#Mexico

[3] https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/flu-epidemic-of-1918/17805

Depends. Do you want pandemics to keep happening?

If you don't, then yes, animal farms in general need to be shut down. But they won't, because the world is addicted to eating meat, and pandemics will keep happening.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to work but I'll see ya in an identical comment section in four years where people will blame, oh I don't know, the eating of chinchillas or something.

No, it originated in Veracruz, Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

yes